Tuesday, May 02, 2006
White guilt and the Kosovo question
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
Read the rest of Shelby Steele's extraordinary essay, and consider a point he does not raise: that in the mind of certain Americans and most Europeans, the real difference between the wars in Iraq and Kosovo is that the latter involved bombing white people.1
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1. The fact that it is hard to find a Middle Eastern Arab who does not also consider himself "white" has no bearing on the broader point, in that the Western left does not consider Arabs to be "white" for the purpose of assigning racial culpability. If it did, we would be fighting this war on entirely different terms, and there would be far more support for Israel within Western chattering classes.
14 Comments:
By 
Lanky_Bastard, at
Tue May 02, 11:36:00 AM:
Who compares a 6 billion dollar intervention sanctioned by the UN to a 200 billion dollar nearly-unilatteral pre-emptive war and comes to the conclusion that racism (or fear of racism) has made us too inhibited in the latter? Someone who writes books on "White Guilt", that's who.
We never questioned our moral authority, not even when people like Pope John Paul II told us to.
By geekesque, at
Tue May 02, 11:54:00 AM:
This essay misses the entire point.
One doesn't defeat insurgencies through 'raw power' just like a surgeon doesn't remove a tumor because he can bench press 400 lbs.
By 
, at
Tue May 02, 12:50:00 PM:
We have our response to Mr. Steele here,
Shelby Steele should try the view from downrange.
Mr. Steele doesn't know much about counterinsurgency tactics. Was he possibly a consultant to the Red Army during its days in Afghanistan?
Westhawk
By geekesque, at
Tue May 02, 02:07:00 PM:
Steele starts with the assumption that 'raw power' can defeat an insurgency. That is a factual insurgency, as many great powers have discovered.
The US occupation in Iraq suffers from a lack of adequate planning and skill, not because the planners lack the requisite bloodthirstiness.
By skipsailing, at
Tue May 02, 02:40:00 PM:
Wow geek you are just so unbelievably ill informed. do you really think that your thoughtless diatribe has any basis in fact?
I guess it amounts to this geek, who ya gonna believe, the KOSkids or your own lying eyes?
By , at
Tue May 02, 04:51:00 PM:
We can bomb the shit outta your country! Especially if your country is full of brown people. Oh, we like that, don't we? That's our hobby now. But it's also our new job in the world: bombing
brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. You got some brown people in your country? Tell 'em to watch the fuck out, or we'll goddamn bomb them!
Well, who were the last white people you can remember that we bombed? In fact, can you remember any white people we ever bombed? The Germans! That's it! Those are the only ones. And that was only because they were tryin' to
cut in on our action.
-George Carlin
By skipsailing, at
Tue May 02, 04:52:00 PM:
Sirius sir has it just about right. To me the left tried a variety of arguments in an attempt to find something that would give them some traction.
I clearly recall the "arabs can't do democracy" approach. It's a really bigoted concept but they ran with it.
The other really offensive anti war argument was "The ME was stable before Bush invaded". this line of reasoning essentially condemns the people of the region to lives of grinding poverty and oppression in the name of "stability". It's sickening really.
the argument I've seen lately is much more subtle. In the beginning of the Iraq conflict many anti war posters were aghast that America provided some support for Saddam.
One poster advised me that "Rumsfeld shook Saddam's hand, I have the picture." When I pointed out that FDR shook Stalin's hand and I had the picture the silence was deafening.
Now I'm seeing a different response. Lately these anti war folks are attempting to convince us that lend lease was a bad idea and FDR, icon that he is, was wrong to support Stalin against Hitler.
I can only conclude that this argument is the natural outgrowth of the response to the original "we made Saddam what he is" argument.
it's just so silly. the anti war crowd continues to sink to new depths of depravity in their determination to make Iraq a failure.
By , at
Tue May 02, 05:20:00 PM:
Perhaps you all should read the essay. (TigerHawk's point was about what Steele doesn't say.)
Steele's central argument is not about racism as a factor in how ferociously we conduct war. It is about the role of political correctness in contemporary warfare.
He writes: "Today words like 'power' and 'victory' are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, 'might' can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression."
Also, I haven't been able to find statistics about this, but Israel is not really a "white" country. And the WSM is only one factor in Israeli right-wing politics. There is huge number of Israelis (Jews)of Arab/Middle Eastern origin. They have very long memories. They, not the WSM, comprise the "base" of the Israeli right.
Steele's argument about political correctness as the lens through which the West's aggressiveness is viewed also have a huge bearing on sentiment vis-a-vis Israel.
Namely, Israel flies in the face of political correctness.
By , at
Tue May 02, 05:23:00 PM:
Steele's argument...has
not
Steele's argument...have
By Final Historian, at
Tue May 02, 09:22:00 PM:
"If the choice is between grinding poverty and oppression and a period of outright massacres and bloodshed in the streets which is to be followed by who knows what, then absolutely stick with stability."
That stability bought us 9/11. You can keep it if you want.
If you want to see how your "stability" is in fact a long term recipe for disaster, I suggest you google up "belmont club" and "Three Conjectures".
By tm, at
Wed May 03, 12:27:00 PM:
Becoming more brutal will only serve to turn the population against us and to the insurgence.
That's the part that boggles my mind about Steele's argument. Loosely, he seems to claim that we'd be brutal and hellbent on killing civilians if it weren't for "white guilt."
The obvious rejoinder is: so much the better for white guilt, then.
Re: Arabs & democracy: the argument has certainly been made that middle eastern societies aren't ready for democracy, but it's a cultural argument, not a racial one.
By Sirkowski, at
Wed May 03, 03:45:00 PM:
The fascists are coming out of the woodwork...
By Dawnfire82, at
Wed May 03, 08:25:00 PM:
Race-based politics are un-American bullshit. We're supposed to be above that kind of classification here. An American is an American, not an African-American, a Mexican-American, an Italian-American, et cetera.
A soldier is a soldier, a friend is a friend, and an enemy is an enemy.
By , at
Thu May 04, 01:06:00 AM:
skipsailing,
"a variety of arguements in an attempt to find something that would give them some traction".
That comment is the definition of projection.
Wasn't the war about WMDs? Oh yeah, that's already been debunked.
Then it was about bringing democracy to the middle east (remember the winning the hearts and mind crap?).
Now we're not resolute enough to kill as many Iraqi's as we need to.
So much for the "heart and minds" winning.
We both know the REAL reason (I repeat, reason--not excuse) for this wat.
Did you ever hear anyone say, "it's not the money, it's the principle of the thing"?
When you hear it, you know the speaker means "it's the money".
This war has a similar saying: "it's not the oil, it's ..."
